POINTS FOR PRESENTATION RED TEAM, THURSDAY JUNE 1

MATCH/MISMATCH storyboard – final results

Fewer scenes. Blob size and shape slightly different from story board. Movements the same in principle, but change in the order of takes and specific movement characteristics.

1. What did you use motion capture for (to show a story, to use it to demonstrate a set of motions, etc.)
To demonstrate a set of motions as if the character is just learning to move, then to show its learning with more advanced movements.

2. Why was motion capture useful for this? Could it have been better attempted through 3D or 2D animation?
Motion Capture was useful to get a set of natural looking movements of something starting to move/evolve. As a group, we have little experience with 2D animation so the comparison cannot be made. Although the simplicity of our animation leads us to believe that it could have been attempted in 2D animation we would still lack the particular features of a movement in normal gravity (e.g. impacts from steps and jumps).

3. Comparison and contrast of Maya Trax Editor vx. Motionbuilder
Both Motionbuilder and Maya were difficult to use to edit as we have just learned both of them. Motionbuilder was easier to learn since we have had many in class demonstrations on it and we have had to use it multiple times to edit.
Using Trax Editor facilitated copying, deleting and shifting movements of specific segments as compared to using the F-curves or control rig in Motion Builder.

4. Show the completed movie(s).

5. Short Explanation of what went right and what went wrong. What would you have done differently if doing it again?

A lot of extra markers appeared when in the ‘curled up’ position. Possibly we could have gotten around this by increasing the minimum marker diameter. Apart from this, the motion capture worked quite well, we had no missing markers.

A lot of fixes were needed because the spine did not behave like it should. A skeleton with more spine segments and shoulders could have helped.

Creating our skin earlier in the quarter would have saved time when editing the motion. We would not have had to repeat as many steps. On the other hand,  we had no previous experience in animation at all so building the model was quite a task in itself.

6. What did you learn from this course?

Motion capture is incredibly interesting and fun. Actually making it work well is very hard.

We learned:
            How to add a favorite path in Motion Builder (in our sleep if necessary)
            Vicon IQ has a mind of its own
            That it’s important to spend a lot of time working on the skeleton
            Keyframing animation
            The cyclical nature of motion capture (Ryan’s wording)
            How to edit a model the hard and easy way in Maya
            How to modify and animate camera views